Janet Flanner was already a legend of American literary journalism when she was sent to cover the Nuremberg Trials. In “Letters from her from Paris” in the 1920s and 1930s for The New Yorker magazine she had reflected the bohemian environments of the French capital, so welcoming and free for members of the Lost Generation. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II she prudently returned to the United States, but in 1944 she returned to Europe as an official correspondent for her country’s army, sending articles about the war that changed her view of the world. The newly liberated Buchenwald could not have the same treatment as the pleasant life between the war.
The Allied victors chose the Nuremberg Palace of Justice to carry out trials between November 1945 and October 1946 against a group of senior Nazi officials, with whom they actually intended to prosecute the responsibility of Hitler’s Germany in the war and in the criminal delirium that culminated in the Holocaust. They did so for symbolic reasons (it was a city with old roots in Germanic culture, that of the master singers, and also where Hitler held great congresses and promulgated his racial laws), as well as practical ones (they opted for a city under military authority US). The town, with the exception of a few buildings, was practically reduced to rubble.
More than 250 international journalists and a small group of German informants traveled to cover the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal.
The German historian Uwe Neumahr addresses his stay in The Writers’ Castle (Taurus publishing house), a book full of interesting data and stories.
Janet Flanner, like most of her colleagues, was housed in the castle of the title, an attractive medieval building from the beginning of the 20th century belonging to the counts Faber-Castell, manufacturers of the famous pencils, which was seized at that time. The huddled journalists shared collective dormitories (separated by sex), a newsroom, few telephones and few toilets; Flanner was quick to complain about the monopoly of Russian journalists, who went in groups and “left it dirty.”
The trial sessions were long and full of technicalities, with the exception of those where the witnesses provided direct testimonies of the horror (the documentaries about the concentration camps, with images never seen before, left the attendees in a state of shock).
Flanner was an independent spirit and in his chronicles he made a tremendous error of judgment: he praised the testimony of the sinister Hermann Göring, the highest Nazi official present, whom he compared to “a gladiator,” and criticized the actions of the American attorney general Robert H. Jackson, a humanitarian reference. She was removed from coverage by the magazine’s editor, Harold Ross (who had however published his texts without censoring them).
Her place was taken by the British Rebecca West, radically anti-German, who established a romantic relationship (clandestine, both were married) with Francis Biddle, the highest-level North American judge. Contact with the unspeakable and family distance prompted several situations of this type.
Neumahr’s work offers numerous side details that give context to this initiative called to change international legislation on war crimes, and to the discussion at that time about what the future of Germany should be: among the journalists themselves it was debated whether to support its reconstruction or keeping the country weak and under tutelage, in punishment for the Nazi era and in anticipation of future evils.
The great novelist John Dos Passos parades through its pages (Hemingway, contrary to what was said, did not attend, but his ex-wife Martha Gellhorn did). Russian-French author Elsa Triolet did not like that the Nazis were given the opportunity to explain themselves, and she claimed that they should have been executed without trial; She crossed paths there with Erika Mann, daughter of the author of The Magic Mountain, actress, writer and journalist; with Gregor von Rezzori, William Shirer, the future television star Walter Cronkite and the future German Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, among many others.
The Barcelona native Carlos Sentis is not mentioned, who covered the process for two months for different Spanish media, he also stayed in the Faber castle, which he defined as “the largest journalistic tower of Babel that time has known” and, like Janet Flanner – It must be said – in an article for La Vanguardia in October 1946 he still showed a certain human sympathy for a Göring who with all “his vanity and extravagance” showed himself during the process to be “always lively, carefree, serene.”
(Hermann Göring received a death sentence as guilty of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Promoter of Heydrich’s “final solution” against the Jews and active looter of works of art, he advanced some hours by hanging, committing suicide in his cell with a cyanide vial).
Nor does it appear in the name index of The Castle of the Writers José Luis Navarro, which was reported for the EFE agency. From the Hispanic world, the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos appears briefly and, giving his opinion from afar about the excessively masculine nature of the trial, the reference figure of Argentine literature Victoria Ocampo.
And the celebrated author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, who was not in Nuremberg, wrote a theatrical pamphlet about the Trial as if he had witnessed it.
